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The Art of Living in Cities - David Macpherson

CXLIII

I

There are many ways to reach the city. You can fly in. Bus in. Take a train. Travel over the water on a bridge. Travel under the water by tunnel. You can be stuffed in a cargo crate with seventy-eight others who paid their life savings for the chance of something better or at least something else and smuggled through. You can wake up from a stupor and like magic, you are in the city. Without your wallet and your shoes or any idea of where you will go from here, but you are in the city.

II

There is a tradition to have the lady you walk with be closer to the street, while you hover near the buildings. You, the man in this tradition because man and woman are one of those traditions we are weighed down in these rituals these ruts, are not being a protector from predators from alleyways and stoops, but from shit and piss falling from the sky. Building dwellers often emptied their piss pots out the windows. They had to be thrown somewhere. A gentleman was the creature willing to get the full brunt of yesterday’s refuse on their heads and shoulders. This is why gentleman wore thick coats and hats with large brims. Gentlemen are the ones who accept shit and piss falling on them. In this city at any rate. I am sure there are some strange places or abodes where people duck, or avoid what is falling on them.

III

You can walk down a street in the city with your laptop open searching for wifi hubs to attach yourself to. You won’t be able to attach yourself to those wifi hubs, but you can at least brush by them, see what they are, see what they call themselves. As you walk down the street, you will see there is I Hate My Father,KoolKat73,NukeEmAll,Aunties House. Turn the corner and you will find more names, more monikers, Hermoine,HotPoppa,The Cat Runs the House. There are planer names. Duller names of location and ownership. But why bother noting them? Why bother with anything other than the colorful and specific?

IV

There are places where men meet to have sex. This is not mentioned in tour guides. This is not talked about in polite conversation, even by those men who later in the evening will politely excuse themselves from their company and go to that place, where they can have sex and pretend to be faceless. Those who are looking for this place will know where to go. It is not certain how that information is passed on. Perhaps, if you look strongly enough into the pavement, to the cracks in the sidewalk, the secret code will reveal itself.

V

In cities there are shops and kiosks where you can buy little cards and be someone else. You can ask to be older so you can drink or go to a dirty movie before the Man allows you to. You can be a citizen and work for minimum wage or more. You can just want to disappear. Who wants to be the same person all the time? Who wants the cards in your pocket always to be accurate? Sometimes it is cheap to get this ID. Sometimes it is beyond your means. But with that in mind, it still does not deny the fact that you can be a different you and pay someone in this city for that unnamed privilege.

VI

Julie has seven roommates. She has only met five of them. The other two